


Thirty-six Roses

by egglorru



Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Andrew is useless at flowers, M/M, Neil is 98 percent snark and 2 percent aware that he's Demi for Andrew, Witch!Andrew, basically a meet cute with a side of cursing Drake, florist!Neil, mentions of canon abuse but not very graphic, so happy all around!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-16
Updated: 2019-04-16
Packaged: 2020-01-14 15:28:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,953
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18479065
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/egglorru/pseuds/egglorru
Summary: All Andrew wanted to do was curse a man. Repeatedly screwing up the key potion ingredient was not improving his mood.Or, how to win the heart of a florist in under a week, by being a difficult customer.





	Thirty-six Roses

**Author's Note:**

  * For [godotco](https://archiveofourown.org/users/godotco/gifts).



> For my lovely friend godotco, who gave me sweet words and encouragement when I was down, and whose own [witch/flower shop au](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14694336) inspired this one <3 (Also I stole your flower dividers sorry not sorry)
> 
> And a thousand million thanks and blessings to nikothespoonklepto for beta-ing for me, you were wonderful :')
> 
> (For anyone a little confused by the capital and lowercase “apothecary”s smattered throughout, trust me I am just as annoyed that a person who runs an apothecary is also _called_ an Apothecary and not like an apothecurist or something, but that’s where we’re at.)

Andrew frowned as he set aside his mortar and pestle. He could sense the faint energy in the desiccated white rose petals he was grinding into powder; it was not nearly potent enough for the curse he was aiming to work. Frustration flared in his head and he sat back. If freshness was an issue, he had a problem. He was growing rather confident in his potion abilities, aside from…well.

He took a long pull from a mug of coffee, sweetened beyond all get-out but black as his soul, and black as his thumb, incidentally. If there was one thing he was useless at, it was keeping plants alive for any length of time. _He_ certainly didn’t have any fresh roses growing about. Maybe cut would be fine? There was a flower shop around the corner that he’d never been in. Even if he’d ever had a need to buy flowers, he probably would have avoided this one, he thought as he stripped off the apron protecting his simple woven black wool shirt and dusted off the knees of his matching trousers.

But it was early, and he didn’t feel like venturing far. Mornings before the apothecary opened were really the only good time to work personal…projects like this. He made his way down the street, turning the corner under a streetlamp burning low, nearly out of its nightly oil supply.

It was almost six in the morning, and the sun was just starting to peek over the roofs on the misty outskirts of the city as Andrew scowled up at the sign over the flower shop. Josten Time: Floral Emergencies, proclaimed the vividly orange letters entwined with a few artfully carved flowers. Underneath was a white, neatly lettered footnote: Neil Josten, Proprietor. What a ridiculous pun. What a ridiculous place.

“I mostly specialize in apology bouquets,” came an amused voice from behind Andrew, as if in response to his uncharitable thought, and he jerked around while moving a hand instinctively to his left armband. The speaker, emerging from an alleyway as yet untouched by even the misty grey light before dawn, was a blue-eyed young man with wind-whipped brown hair, sharp features, and only a few inches on Andrew.

His eyes slid up a toned athletic physique in loose cropped brown pants and a lightweight shirt of undyed linen to a pretty face with a light flush and a sheen of sweat. Out for some early exercise, Andrew thought with distaste, but was distracted as he focused on the man’s cheeks. The right looked as though he might have fallen face-first into a rose bush, but the left…two smooth, pink burns were raised in the skin along his cheekbone, like someone had held a hot coal to the skin. The sight of them sent a faint tingle down Andrew’s back. Once might have been an unfortunate misadventure. Twice was deliberate.

If the man noticed where Andrew’s attention was resting, he didn’t give any indication, though Andrew’s stare was enough to spur him into continuing, and he gave a good-natured chuckle as he lifted his hands in a soothing manner. “But you don’t look like the kind of person who apologizes much. I’m sure I can help you make a bouquet to suit whatever meaning you need. Come on in?” And with that he moved past Andrew to unlock the shop door. Andrew saw more thin scars and burn marks on the back of his hands and knuckles, leading up into the man’s cuffs.

Andrew didn’t like any man quiet enough to catch him off guard, but he liked even less the way the rising sun made coppery glints turn the man’s messy brown hair into a burnished auburn and the way his scars were a puzzling contrast to his occupation and easygoing manner of speech. The unassuming friendliness was…off on a man who’d likely been on the wrong side of danger at least once in his life, and Andrew wasn’t sure if the customer-service tone was what rankled him, or if he just didn’t like stumbling across something vaguely interesting at such a god-awful hour of the day.

He certainly didn’t have time to suss out what little amusement the florist might afford him; he had to finish this curse as soon as possible. From what Nicky told him, there was very little more his cousin could do from his position in the public welfare office to delay the paperwork, and he had to be done before the orphanage began to take in children. He _would_ be done. He’d sworn it to himself.

The young man – Josten, presumably; the confidence with which he seemed to inhabit the space didn’t speak of apprenticeship, despite looking a little younger than Andrew himself – wound his way around tables covered in vases full of flowers, pulling back curtains from windows as he went to let in the growing warmth and sunshine. “Give me an emotion or a color palette or something to work with,” called Josten over his shoulder as he slipped into a back room, which Andrew found a bit optimistic given that he hadn’t said a word to the shopkeeper thus far. There wasn’t nearly enough coffee in him yet for conversation.

He couldn’t grow plants, but he could recognize a fair few and carefully reached into a vase to retrieve some white roses. He reflected on the vision that he was still shaking off the effects of. A half dozen would suit. He took less care selecting the blooms once he realized the roses were dethorned. Josten emerged again, in a fresh undyed linen shirt of similar style and tying a dusky green apron around his waist, to find Andrew already standing on the other side of the counter with the six roses laid in an unceremonious pile on its smooth wooden surface.

Josten raised an eyebrow at him. “Anything else? Shall I wrap them nicely, do you want a note…?”

Andrew just let his stare flatten and pulled his purse from a pocket of his trousers. Josten huffed in response. “Tuppence. And I suppose I’ll consider your attitude a charming tip.”

Andrew dropped the coins on the counter instead of making contact with Josten’s open palm, swiped the flowers up into one fist, and turned without another lost second. The apothecary would open in another half-hour, and he needed to get as far as possible on his brew before he had to tuck it out of sight and deal with mixing up tinctures and balms for the general ailing public instead. He quickened his step as he ran through a mental tally of the remaining prepared ingredients. He had enough to start on another attempt immediately; he might even complete this if all went well.

✿✿✿

It went…almost spectacularly wrong. As he pulled the fresh petals off of the stems, he immediately knew something felt wrong, but he proceeded anyway. When he scattered them across the surface of the simmering brew of carefully-measured herbs and bird bones, they seemed to _hiss_ on contact in a way that hurt his brain. A flash of the vision he’d meditated under the snare of henbane to attain – a vase of white roses falling over on a shelf, the flowers tipping into his little cauldron – seared behind his eyes with a stab of agony, and he found himself on his hands and knees, blinking away spots and trying to focus on what it meant.

They were shriveled up, but he’d tried dried petals already. Maybe the whole flower. He’d seen the whole flowers falling into the roiling, pitch-colored brew and disintegrating oddly before the cauldron’s contents turned to a steaming, placid translucence, shimmering with power.

Standing with effort, Andrew glanced at the clock on the wall, scowling as he quickly snuffed the fire and relegated his cauldron to a brick in the corner to cool, out of the way. Then he drew a curtain across the entrance to the back room and headed to the door. As he flipped the sign around and unlatched it, he saw a familiar elderly gentleman standing impatiently on the other side, and the man pushed against the door before Andrew could even swing it open for him. Rude fuck.

“About time!” Complained the customer. “The missus is harping about the rheumatism again, just because her salve is due to run out two days from now! Once again I don’t have time to wait for the Apothecary to come to work, around my own dealings for the day, but, well,” he eyed Andrew’s diminutive stature disdainfully, as though that alone could indicate youth or inexperience, and his tone became grudging at best, but more likely just insulting to his wife, “she doesn’t seem to notice the difference when you mix it up, Apprentice. Hop to.”

Andrew set about doing so in silence. He was fairly certain half of the shop’s regular clientele assumed he was mute, which his master encouraged, given as whenever he deliberately spoke his mind to a deserving customer, they tended to exclaim in offense and flounce out the door.

‘People don’t need a brain to spend their money,’ Wymack would dryly remind him, ‘but they often need to feel important as they hand it over.’ So Andrew kept his mouth shut. Wymack was a good master to apprentice under; taking no offense at how easily he remembered what he read and how little supervision he needed. Wymack wasn’t threatened by the rate at which he mastered the craft, unlike two former masters and one previous older apprentice. He did what he could to keep the business running smoothly and not piss off the old grouch unduly, in return.

And he _certainly_ didn’t let Wymack know he was doing witchcraft in the back room.

He collected the proper payment from the old man and then set about sweeping the shop and opening the west-facing windows to let in light without exposing the baskets and jars of herbs and tinctures to undue amounts of sunlight, as that would weaken their potency. He dealt with another couple of customers – early morning tended to beset frantic bedside tenders of sick people upon him, which was fine. He could effortlessly mix tinctures to suit a description of symptoms no matter what his caffeine level was, and if the problem couldn’t be fixed with just a tincture or salve, the only word he had to utter was ‘hospital’ and the customer would scuttle off to cause Aaron problems instead.

About a half-hour later, Wymack strode in the door – unusually, the tiny room over the shop was used as Wymack’s office instead of a living space for himself or his apprentice, but Wymack had a separate home with his wife a few streets over, between his apothecary and her job as head nurse at the city’s largest hospital, and Andrew contributed to the room and board for one of the bedrooms in Wymack’s home, which he shared with his brother and cousin. Every Monday morning, Wymack’s arrival was offset by a trip to the hospital with Abby to assess the quantities of the hospital’s medicinal stocks.

“Coffee,” Wymack grunted, and Andrew jerked a thumb at the pot already simmering in the corner. “Better be black.” Andrew arched an eyebrow, which Wymack met in kind. “Better be _only_ black,” Wymack clarified, and Andrew gave a single nod. Satisfied at the horrendous lack of sugar in the _only_ black coffee Andrew had brewing, Wymack poured off a generous amount of the liquid into a mug – from high up, cooling on the fall, somehow not spilling or splashing a drop – and immediately took a gulp when the mug was full, sighing in satisfaction.

“Aaron asked me to tell you that a couple of pro bono kids in the hospital are ready for release into supervision, as soon as that orphanage is up and running to take them in.”

Andrew turned his head sharply, and Wymack’s eyes were just as hard as his own. His master may not know any of the…specific _details_ leading to his crusade against the orphanage, but he knew how little Andrew cared about most things and how much he cared about this one.

“I’m going to work on accounts in my office,” Wymack continued. “Should be pretty slow today, my hip says it’s gonna rain. Call me if there’s a medicine you need help making up,” he said more out of habit than anything as he dropped the hospital supply list on the counter. “And don’t serve a customer anything that might put my shop into disrepute.”

Andrew nodded again, and thought about the look in Wymack’s eye as he’d said his last piece. Sometimes, he wondered how much of his illicit experiments in the back room he successfully kept from Wymack, and how much of that was simply because Wymack didn’t want to know.

Either way, the trust the older man placed in him and the relative ease with which they worked around each other made him even more determined not to do anything that might bring trouble to his master.

✿✿✿

It was, in fact, a slow day, slow enough to meticulously scrub out his little cauldron while waiting for beeswax to melt in a large double-boiler to mix with medicinal herbs and cool into many little sachets of various salves. Customers were scarce with the sky grumbling outside, so he made quick progress on the hospital stock, and he knew Wymack wouldn’t come downstairs while busy with the monthly accounts as long as Andrew brought up coffee every couple of hours.

When most of his own ingredients were cut and sorted, and the salves were laid out on a table to solidify, Andrew slid a few coins into the register to account for the herbs and silkie bones he’d appropriated for his own use, then shut down the shop for a few brief minutes and hurried around the corner under slow, fat raindrops. He entered Josten Time for the second time. It was a pity that the orange letters likely wouldn’t leave his memory until the day he died or contracted dementia. He hated puns. Even if he only read one himself, it surfaced visceral recollections of people grinning like they thought their dumb wordplay made them clever, and he hated stupid people more than anything.

Josten was with a customer when Andrew strode in and plucked another half-dozen roses out of the same vase, but he didn’t go unnoticed for more than a second.

“Oh hey, perfect timing!” Josten called out, and then returned to a conversational tone with his other customer, just loud enough for Andrew to overhear from the far end of the shop. “Which is what I’m known for here,” he continued with a wink that made the girl giggle and Andrew roll his eyes. “You needed something that means dickweed, and I just got in a species that symbolizes that perfectly!”

Josten studied Andrew’s flower choice and clothes, unfazed by the apprentice’s narrowed eyes, and added, “His monochrome color scheme won’t work with the rest of the bouquet, though. Let’s finish it out with some nice pink horseshoe geraniums for stupidity. Is your intended recipient too fishbrained to grasp the meaning of your bouquet? I can write up a helpful card…if they can read?” The girl agreed with a satisfied smirk and started counting out payment while Neil finished writing with a flourish and affixed the card to the bouquet with a black ribbon.

The girl left, and Andrew stepped up to the counter. He didn’t bother to set them down this time, simply brandished the flower heads at Josten long enough to show that there were a half dozen again, then tucked the bunch under his arm and extracted tuppence from his coin purse once more. He set the coins on the counter and turned his back without a word. Josten was oddly but blessedly silent through the exchange, but spoke up as he reached the door.

“It was a joke, sorry. Making rude bouquets always brings out my more malicious streak, but it was supposed to be in good fun.”

Andrew paused, then shrugged. “You waste your time on meaningless things.”

“What do you mean?”

Andrew looked back at the frowning man, whose hair and eyes shone as brightly in the noon sun streaming in the windows as any of the flowers surrounding him. “Apologies. I don’t believe in regret.”

Josten shrugged. “There’s good money in apologies.” He smiled a little wryly as he looked around his shop.

“And I already paid you, so there isn’t a point.” He opened the door, and added on his way out, “You’re more palatable rude than contrite. And politeness doesn’t suit you.” Over the rustle of the hood he pulled up over his head against the rain, he just barely heard Josten chuckling behind him.

“Thanks for the tip,” Josten called as the door clicked shut.

✿✿✿

Back in the apothecary, Andrew brought a fresh mug of coffee up to his master before shuttering the windows against the rapidly increasing downpour. Safe from customers and interference for the time being, he once again began to brew together the herbs and bones meticulously, and charcoal-marked a few runes spaced out in a triangle on one of the flat paving stones next to his cauldron: time, efficiency, and strength. Then he placed the roses on the stone to die faster while retaining the potency of whatever property they held that his curse needed.

When his brew smoothly reached the bubbling black consistency of molten tar once more, he picked up the roses – wilted and limp, not quite dry but definitely dead – and dangled the bunch over the steaming cauldron. It didn’t feel _wrong_ like the fresh petals had. He hoped the strength rune had worked; the drooping stems didn’t really fill him with confidence that they were holding any sort of power.

He lowered them into the brew, and – the potion fizzed and overflowed, and what encountered the fire underneath spat foul-smelling black sparks onto the clean paving stones even as the fire guttered and drowned under the globby, violent black mess. Andrew sighed, looked up at the small gaps in the wood of the ceiling, through which the smell was no doubt perforating, and poured a cup of coffee to take up to his master.

Wymack looked up when the door opened and gave a pointed sniff. Andrew’s expression said ‘Ask me no questions.’ Wymack’s expression grunted ‘Why the fuck would you assume I want to know?’

“Just clean it,” was all his master said, and Andrew nodded, inwardly relieved. How much longer he could get away with mistakes like this, he didn’t know. Wymack HAD to suspect his actions fell on the vaguer and darker side of herbology, poison at the very least, but so far Andrew hadn’t crossed too hard a line, apparently. He would just have to do better, be more discreet, so that when he did finally kill a man, Wymack would have nothing on his conscience by extension.

Back home that night, Wymack, Abby, their son Kevin, Andrew, his twin Aaron, and his cousin Nicky sat at the dinner table, talking and chewing. Andrew tore his bread into small pieces to sop up the remainder of his stew as he listened in comfortable silence, watching his little unlikely family chatter cheerfully, though they carefully maneuvered around the topic they knew would darken his mood. But because it was all he could think about, it still slipped through in obvious undertones.

Aaron sighed about how he could FINALLY  sit in the courtyard and converse with Katelyn during lunch again (the loud construction on the orphanage down the street had drawn to a close). Nicky babbled about having a nice quiet day at the public welfare building and all about the gorgeous blond man who’d come in and agreeably occupied him for half of his shift (the paperwork he’d been stalling was out of his hands and he was grateful for a distraction from worrying).

Kevin, a history nerd with satisfyingly rude opinions about the people who’d crippled the progress of science and medicine by outlawing and torching witches, and incidentally the only person who knew Andrew checked out old witchcraft reference books from the library he worked at, told Andrew he’d brought home a book on an old language he might like to study, which definitely meant runes. Wymack and Abby exchanged a look, and Wymack told Andrew to head to the shop a couple hours earlier if he could manage it, since “the day after rain was bound to be twice as busy”, which was true, but had nothing to do with the timing of Wymack’s request. Andrew took it for the non-express consent it was to keep doing more of the ‘experiments’ they didn’t speak about, and nodded silently.

He was running out of time.

✿✿✿

As soon as he had the basic ingredients assembled into the expected black viscous liquid the next morning and simmering on low, Andrew ducked out of the shop and around the corner to Josten’s place.

It was before dawn, but by a stroke of luck, Josten appeared to have gotten an early start as well. Spying Andrew hovering by the door through one of the open windows, he headed over to unlock the door. “You’re doing the annoying customer thing. Waiting pointedly for me to open. If you worked in a shop you’d know how annoying that really is.”

Andrew did, and currently did not care. He headed for the vase he needed, guided more by his own mental map than the flickering candle in a sconce on the wall, and heard Josten huff out a slightly exasperated laugh behind him.

“You know…white roses are for purity, and this is the third bouquet. Either you’re sending them to a deflowered girl to be a facetious dickweed, or you’re bashing the ‘I’m not just after your virtue, I _promise_ ’ line so ferociously that you’re coming off as a use-em-and-lose-em fuckboy. Not sure which is worse. Maybe consider branching out a bit in your floral gestures?”

Andrew didn’t even make time to reply today. He’d had a horrible night’s sleep, full of the old nightmares, and then fresh variants where he watched helplessly as the same horrors befell a strange little boy, and then another, and another. A line of narrow beds in a row, iron headboards and white sheets, and young scared boys waiting their turn in the orphanage dormitory. He couldn’t get up, growing hotter and hotter as he struggled, until he finally looked down to find himself cooking slowly in his own failed curse potion, his arms bound to the cauldron handles by the constricting stems of his limp dead roses. Waking up under a heavy blanket with the sheets tangled around his arms was a relief and a frustration, to realize that a physical sensation could have inspired such a fucked-up mental mimicry.

He didn’t even go to the counter. He simply set the two pennies, which he’d entered the shop already clenching tightly in his hand, on the table next to the vase, and turned back to the door. “Don’t. Not today.”

Josten gauged his expression and let the smile drop from his own face. “Okay. Tomorrow, then?” He teased very gently, and Andrew frowned as he walked past.

“I hope not.” But he caught the door as it closed behind him and found himself adding, “Though I’ll be sure to…tip better if I do have to come back.”

He wasn’t quite sure what spurred him to basically promise better behavior in future, and he definitely wouldn’t consider it an apology for the way he was acting today, but the chuckle behind him at that little private joke lifted his spirits in a way that he refused to analyze too closely. Instead he opted to focus on how he’d attempt to add the roses this time.

The lack of _wrong_ feeling with the dead roses yesterday evening had been a step in the right direction, he’d thought, but the ensuing reaction indicated otherwise. Perhaps he should interpret the dead look of the roses in the vision to simply indicate his own lack of skill with living plants, a sign that he was indeed meant to buy flowers from Josten. Well. To buy flowers from a skilled florist, not specifically Josten. At any rate, the wrongness of yesterday morning seemed to coincide with removing the petals. Perhaps fresh flowers, stems and all, were the way to proceed.

He moved through the apothecary and into the back room, and without further delay he brought the potion back up to a boil and dropped in his six fresh roses.

✿✿✿

Andrew slowly came to from a vivid, stretched-out nightmare of hands. Hands holding him down, hands cutting off his air, hands bruising his wrists and hips, hands scratching bloody lines down his chest while another part of his foster brother made him bleed inside for the very first time. So many hands, all at once, memories overlapping and blurring together but every burst of pain happening simultaneously and in perfect clarity. He was still seeing the images even as his eyes opened, as they seemed to skitter over the shiny surface of the black slop that was spread across the paving stones and slowly cooling. His skin crawled with the ghosts of each and every touch, and he swallowed hard against the bile creeping up his throat. He finally realized that there was a gentle but insistent pressure in his side and dragged his head up to see it was Wymack nudging him with a shoe while wringing out a wet cloth. Even looking at it fall, the wet cloth dropping onto his lap made him jolt and become aware of the wetness on his cheeks as well.

“Go cool off,” Wymack told him, voice gruff with badly-disguised concern. “Eat something, I doubt we’re going to get lunchtime today with the way customers are already lining up at the door. Handle the front, keep your mind off…things. I’ll clean up back here.”  Wymack paused, going very still before softly continuing. “If your…experiments are going to go this wrong, this may not...be the best way for you to proceed, Andrew.”

 

Andrew’s throat closed up for a moment and he struggled to inhale. He felt like he was inhaling his failed potion instead of the cool herbal air of the back room.

“It’s not an order. Maybe there’s another way to get what you want. Just…think it through before you consider this again.”

Andrew nodded and, despite his absolute lack of appetite and the sick feeling in his stomach, shoved a piece of dried meat into his mouth to chew as he slipped out of the back room, scrubbing his face with the wet cloth before heading to the door to unlock it for the day.

✿✿✿

Wymack had not been wrong, they were the kind of busy that started off hectic, then settled into a relieved rhythm, then successfully thwarted any other thoughts outside of the tinctures in front of you, and then came out the other side to the kind of busy that choked you from how long you hadn’t had a chance to stop and breathe. Wymack joined him an hour into the rush – cleanup had been _that bad_ , he thought, frustrated at his spectacular failure – but that didn’t seem to help any against the onslaught of people clamoring for cures. What, had the entire city stayed out in the rain and caught pneumonia, he thought uncharitably as he vehemently made more salves in the now-spotless back room while Wymack tried to maintain order up front.

It ended as the kind of day where you locked the doors at closing time to stop the influx, and let customers out individually after they paid amid outside protests of ‘just real quick!’ that ranged from pleading to furious. Andrew was not moved. “If it’s urgent then go to the hospital,” he snapped more than once, and shut the door dangerously close to fingers trying to stop him from doing just that.

When the shop went silent at long last and he sank onto a bench, Wymack wearily started steeping some coffee and tossed a loaf of bread at Andrew, which he barely caught, testament to the day’s exhaustion. A few minutes later Wymack sat on the table next to him and handed him a mug of coffee and a bowl of sugar, barely lifting an eyebrow as Andrew forwent the spoon in favor of just pouring from the bowl. The sweet coffee was bracing; the sugar sludge at the bottom made life possibly worth living again.

Finally, he looked seriously at his master and answered the morning’s conversation. “There’s no proof against him, for anything he’s done. And I can’t take on a former royal soldier any other way than what I am doing and not get caught.” If he tried to approach Drake with his knives, he knew that he would simply freeze and fail, never mind getting caught. What a disgusting, crippling thing trauma was. When this was over with, he’d go to the hospital and see Bee again. But he didn’t have time now; it was running out so quickly. If a single child spent a night in the new orphanage Drake had finally achieved the social services permits to direct, Andrew knew he couldn’t live with himself.

“I’m getting close,” he continued, forcibly keeping the uncertainty and pain off of his face. He certainly was running out of ways to fail, anyway. “…let me.”

It was as close to begging as he could get without throwing up and Wymack’s face said he knew it. “Don’t burn down my shop, and get in early again tomorrow,” was all Wymack said, and Andrew sagged against the table in exhausted relief.

✿✿✿

Andrew couldn’t explain the rather…good mood he woke up in. It was rare that he felt refreshed on so little sleep, but perhaps it was because his lack of it was due to studying this time, not nightmares. He repeated the same routine as the day before with rather a more positive feeling than the previous iteration. When the cauldron was simmering, he knocked on Josten’s window frame after spotting him inside the flower shop early once more.

“I had a feeling you’d need me here early!” Josten informed him cheerfully. “Are we being a fuckboy again, or are we finally letting me steer your love life somewhere more successful?”

Andrew silently headed to the roses again, and the sigh behind him was definitely edging further toward exasperation than amusement.

“Seriously, don’t you think your girl is getting tired of the same flowers over and over? This will make three days in a row, and twice on Monday.”

“…it’s for a man.” Andrew said truthfully, and gauged Josten’s response, which was…absolutely nothing. No shock, no horror, and certainly no furtive reevaluation due to new awareness of a potential listing on the market, so to speak. Not bigoted, but certainly not gay. Ah well.

Instead, Josten simply nodded once, raised an unimpressed eyebrow, and changed the gender. “Don’t you think your guy is getting tired of white roses? You really need to spice it up a little. Even the hopeless and pathetic romances that stumble through here entertain me a bit, but yours is just straight up boring. Though…” He eyed Andrew consideringly. “You don’t really look like the type to romance anyone, frankly. Kind of a take-what-I-want-and-what-I-want-is-snarling-hate-sex guy.”

Andrew glowered at him and Josten looked taken aback at the suddenness of it. “Explicit consent is important to me, I don’t _take_ what I want.” Josten blinked at him, looking not apologetic but understanding and respectful of his viewpoint, and that went a long way in cooling the anger that had flared up so rapidly. “And what if I am into antagonism, who are you to judge?”

Josten grinned at him. “Then a half dozen flowers is tuppence, and I’ll consider today’s attitude a _flattering_ tip.”

Andrew sighed, unsure why the annoying and presumptuous florist could make him need to fight a wry uplift threatening the corner of his mouth. “What would you suggest for ‘spicing it up’? What would _you_ want instead?”

Josten cackled at the easy victory. “I have all the flowers I need. And white roses suit me fine, since I don’t usually swing. _I_ could use some extra special fertilizer, but for your beau? If you need to stick with the ‘I’m not trying to snatch your virtue’ vibe you’ve got going with the roses, maybe lily of the valley. If you want to move it up into something a bit more romantic but not screaming lust, perhaps ambrosia flowers for ‘will you return my love?’ Since consent is a strong factor for you, a flower that asks instead of declares would be appropriate.”

Andrew glanced behind him. “Where? Let me see.”

Josten pointed, and Andrew went over to inspect some orange ambrosias while Josten headed into the back room for a moment. When he returned from the greenhouse – by the candlelight inside it Andrew could now see a riot of greenery and flowers surrounded by glass windows – Andrew was waiting patiently at the counter with six white roses and the faintest smirk curled into the corner of his lips.

Neil’s eyes narrowed to slits and he leaned over the counter. “I should charge you double for wasting my valuable time.”

Andrew felt the other corner of his mouth twitch very slightly. “You wouldn’t do that to your favorite customer. You might scare me off.” Suddenly, he tilted his head in consideration. Perhaps he really needed to replicate the actual situation of the flowers in his vision. Dead in a vase, withered dry but not wilted. Falling into the potion from a height. “Hey. How do you keep flowers…perky while they die?”

Josten stared at him. “Put them in water.”

Andrew nodded his gratitude. He’d definitely not tried that yet. He dropped two pennies on the counter.

Josten said very politely, “See you tomorrow, fuckboy,” and Andrew responded “Most likely, Josten,” with a sigh as he headed for the door.

“Neil,” offered Josten from behind him.

Andrew paused, turned around, and gave a mocking salute with two fingers before leaving the shop.

✿✿✿

This time, Andrew marked a protection rune onto one side of a handkerchief, as a buffer, laid it face down, and marked a new rune from Kevin’s book, one labeled simply ‘death’, onto the side facing up. Then he set the vase full of water and roses on top, and started on the other ingredients for his potion. When he finished and checked the roses, they were…well, they were dead. The flowers were dry, and the stems were slimy and rotten. The water was sickly brown, and it _smelled_. Andrew wasn’t sure if this counted as a replicate of his vision, as that vase had still looked clear, but he thought of Drake and the little time he had left to make this work, and knew he had to risk it.

He heard Wymack come in and lock the door behind, and after a moment’s hesitation, the heavy boots started unmistakably up the stairs to the office. Andrew waited for silence to resume, then picked up the handkerchief and held the vase aloft over his potion. When he tipped it, he tried to keep the water in while letting the flowers slide out with a disgusting slick sound into the potion below.

It exploded.

Andrew threw his hands up in front of his face, and by a stroke of absolute luck, the protection rune on the handkerchief he was holding shimmered in front of his face while the death rune on the other side seemed to suck the light and the noise into itself.

It is killing an _explosion_ , Andrew thought. It is ‘killing’ a nonliving concept. This was a powerful rune, and too vague and versatile to risk again without further research.

The rune did not, however, absorb the mess spreading toward his boots. He needed to check his cauldron for holes, but not before it cooled, and he needed to reassure his master, but not without coffee. So he went to pour some.

Wymack’s eyes were a bit wider than usual, perhaps, and he had the door open at the top of the stairs, so he must have heard some of the noise before it was consumed by the rune. Andrew silently offered the mug of _only_ black coffee. Wymack said, “Well, the office is still up here, so I assume there’s still a shop underneath it,” and shut the door in Andrew’s face. “Clean it,” came a muffled afterthought through the wood, and Andrew nodded even though Wymack couldn’t see, and headed downstairs to scrub everything up before it was time to open.

✿✿✿

The day was full of the people who hadn’t managed to make it in the doors the previous day, and Andrew couldn’t find time to do more than slip in some food at some approximation of lunchtime. Wymack left early to bring a batch of tinctures to the hospital upon completion of their six-week steeping, leaving Andrew to close up alone. It was near dark outside by the time he got the shop clean and the doors locked, and Josten Time was shuttered, so he headed to the library.

He borrowed a book on fertilizers past closing time, perks of having a pseudo-family member in charge of the stacks, and studied up that night, then dug up some dirt from Wymack’s tiny backyard and put it in a bucket onto which he’d marked the rune for strength. In the early morning, he hauled the bucket to the apothecary, mixed it with a few handfuls of phosphorus and nitrogen pellets, added a pile of used coffee grounds from a pot that he and Wymack habitually, and apparently fortuitously, found themselves too lazy to empty until it was full past the brim, and dumped it all into a sack onto which he marked the words ‘extra special fertilizer’. Most likely, anyway. It felt strong, and not malicious, though he was starting to doubt his sense of feeling when it came to magic. One bad experience, and all that. Well, four.

It was just after dawn when he opened the door to Josten Time, and Josten – Neil – was nowhere in sight, though there was a young man at the counter with a distinct guilty air about him. Andrew selected his roses and walked up to stand behind the man in line, and heard sounds from the greenhouse preceding the emergence of the proprietor.

“Buttercups for childishness,” Joste- _Neil_ announced decisively, and his eyes flickered from his customer to Andrew’s face with mild surprise, and then up to Andrew’s blond hair with a small smirk. He artfully interspersed the bright yellow flowers into the bouquet growing in a vase on the counter. “Remember to face the buttercups toward yourself when you hand them to your mom,” he added as he wrapped a pink ribbon around the bunch before lifting it from the vase and exchanging it for some coins. “It _is_ an apology, after all.”

“…which one meant lasting beauty, again?” The man asked, tripping over his own tongue as he went.

Neil pointed at one of the clusters of cheerful orange flowers. “Cheiranthus.” The man almost shrank back from the word. Neil looked him over as if analyzing his stutter and relented. “More commonly called the wallflower. Do you want me to write up a card explaining the meanings?”

“N-no,” stammered the man. He broke off a sprig of the wallflowers and reached boldly across the counter to tuck them behind Neil’s ear. “You c-could use that though. Uh. Yeah.”

Andrew’s hand was resting on his armband as he observed the stiff set of Neil’s shoulders and confused expression. After a second Neil relaxed and said carelessly, “Yeah, a face like mine needs some beauty to offset it sometimes. Thanks.”

The man stared, swallowed, licked his lips, shuffled. Neil arched an eyebrow. “Do you…need another bouquet?” At this, the man flushed and muttered a negative.

Andrew waited in silence while the man bumbled his way out of the shop and then stepped up to the counter, setting down his roses.

“Hey there buttercup, just the usual?” Neil asked with a cheeky grin.

Andrew ignored the implication of the new nickname, which he probably deserved after messing with Neil yesterday. He looked over his shoulder at the door and then at the flowers brushing Neil’s temple. They made his hair look a little darker and redder by contrast, and complimented his eyes beautifully. Neil shrugged. “Sometimes people give me back a ‘beauty’ flower to counter my scars. They usually don’t reach over the counter and do it themselves without asking me, and I don’t get why they think it’s any kind of polite to draw attention to it in the first place, but whatever.”

Andrew stared at the idiot, unsure if Neil was being purposely unaware or just pointedly uninterested, but decided not to waste his breath. The flowers suited Neil. They meant lasting beauty and Neil _was_ beautiful despite what someone had clearly done to try and break him.

“How do you keep flowers perky and _dry_ as they die?” Andrew simply clarified from the previous day. “They rotted.”

Neil frowned. “Rotted? In one day?”

Andrew caught his misstep and shrugged. “No, the first bunch.”

“You…haven’t been giving them to your beau?”

“…he’s not a beau. And no.”

“Okay…” Neil seemed unsure of what to make of Andrew just then.

“I need them to be dried before I…give them to him.”

Neil’s eyes shot back to Andrew’s. “Dried white roses.”

Andrew shrugged, meeting Neil’s scrutinizing stare with a challenging one of his own. “I don’t know why, I just feel like they need to be dried.”

“White roses change their meaning when they’re dried,” Neil warned him. “Fresh ones mean purity. Dried ones…‘death is preferable to loss of virtue’,” he quoted, and Andrew felt a zing of rightness go through him. It matched his intention flawlessly: Drake’s death, to stop the suffering of even one more child. Dried whole roses was the way forward, he was sure of it now.

“How do I get them to dry without wilting or rotting?”

Neil eyed him with a concern that made him itch.

“Don’t look at me like that,” he spat irritably. “How do I dry them?”

“Is this guy…bothering you?” Neil asked carefully.

Andrew growled then, an uncomfortable feeling crawling up his spine at the idea of _Neil_ going anywhere near Drake to confront him, and picked up the sack of fertilizer at his feet, thunking it on the counter. “I will give you this if you stop fucking asking questions and stop _looking at me like that._ How do I dry the damn flowers?”

Neil stared at the sack, and Andrew was nearly as distracted by the light flush that rose in Neil’s cheeks at the reminder of yesterday’s conversation, as he was gratified that Neil shut up with the inquisition.

“Uh…you can hang them upside down in a cool, dry place and let them air dry. Or…in a vase, if you want the flowers dried upright. With just an inch or so of water, again in a cool, dry place. Out of the sun is best, or they’ll brown as they dry. The flowers will use up the water to stay fresh and perky, and then naturally dry out.”

Neil opened the sack then, and sniffed the contents gently with a pleased expression. “Where did you get this?”

“I made it,” Andrew told him with just a hint of pride that Neil approved of his first attempt at fertilizer. “I’m an Apothecary’s apprentice, at the Foxglove Apothecary around the corner.”

Neil nodded. “Thanks for this,” he said, squeezing the sack with one hand and gathering Andrew’s roses into the other. “Keep the flowers in return.”

Andrew scowled at him and pulled out tuppence anyway. “You already paid the price of the fertilizer. The flowers are separate.” He took the flowers, ignored Neil’s protest, and left the pennies on the counter as he left. He paused in the door, though. “Andrew,” he added. It seemed ridiculous now, how stretched out their introduction had been, and Neil laughed like he agreed.

✿✿✿

Andrew opted away from the death rune this time, returning to his triangle of time, efficiency, and strength, and placed the vase with just an inch of water and roses on top. He kept an eye on it every few minutes as he chopped and stirred his other ingredients, noting how quickly he was getting through the preparation. The efficiency rune must be radiating out to affect him as well. He was pleased to see the water draining quickly under the time rune, the flowers drying out nicely soon afterward.

 _Finally,_ the bubbling tar-like potion shimmered into the translucent final product of his vision as the flowers dissolved into it, and Andrew _nearly_ smiled. It was satisfying to look at, but something about it…no. Andrew bent down and dipped a spoon in, let it cool, and held it up for inspection. He sniffed it. The potion shouldn’t be a harm to anyone but Drake, as he’d gone under the grips of henbane specifically to find an ingredient to substitute for a belonging of Drake’s, so he tentatively licked a drop from the spoon. It was…sweet. And there wasn’t even a hint of power in it.

“DAMMIT!” He threw the spoon across the room in frustration.

And then his head snapped his up in alarm and fury at the noise of surprise that Neil Josten let out when it hit him in the chest and bounced to the floor.

It was almost a shock how quickly Andrew had one of his knives out and aimed at this man, this man who he thought was pretty and whom he’d been pointlessly flirting with only maybe twenty minutes before. He _couldn’t_ be arrested for witchcraft, not now, not this close to saving over a hundred children from Drake’s disgusting claws. “ _What are you doing here?_ ” He didn’t even recognize his own voice, curdled with icy fury. Dimly he realized he must have forgotten to lock the shop door, how idiotic.

It was also almost a shock how…calm Neil was in the face of an enraged man with a knife.

“The potion isn’t going to work, is it?” He asked softly. It was easy to hear him in the suffocating, dead silence in the shop. When Andrew just stared at him, he added, “I didn’t want to take your money for those roses. And I thought maybe if you were sending a man dried roses, you might want the thorns still attached to also let him know he’s a prick, so I clipped some more from the greenhouse in exchange for the tuppence. And, well.” Neil’s eyes fell on the useless potion at Andrew’s feet. “‘Death is preferable to loss of virtue’”, he quoted again, very quietly, and here in the back room, under the tense thrum of anger and magic in the air, the words themselves seemed to house violence and justice. “If you’re invoking _his_ death with that curse you’re brewing, you’re definitely going to need the thorns.”

Andrew’s eyes met Neil’s for several long, tense seconds, and then he slowly lowered his knife, but not his guard. “How do you know. Why do you even think it’s a curse. This is an apothecary. These are an Apothecary’s tools and ingredients.”

“You gave yourself away, don’t you think?” Neil nodded at the knife that had been aimed unerringly at his chest with a faint smile, but it faded as he raised a scarred finger to rub almost unconsciously at the burns on his cheek. “Mum was a witch. Dad knew, and he married her because he thought he could control her to gain power himself. But…well, I get my stubbornness from her, which tells you how well that worked. When he tried to kill her instead, she took me and ran. _I’m_ not any kind of witch,” he added at Andrew’s sharp look, “I only inherited her way with plants. But she wasn’t going to risk my father believing otherwise.” He shuffled his feet. “I guess she wasn’t a very strong witch, either, because none of her curses killed my father.”

It took Neil several moments to swallow dryly again and find his words. “When my father caught up to us and killed her, he was sure she’d taken me because I was a witch too, and he did want to control me the same way. At some point, the torture turned from breaking me in to his will, to making sure I wasn’t lying about my lack of magical ability. I have…no idea how long that lasted. My mum’s brother apparently learned to dabble in divination along with plants at some point, and he found us. He broke in and killed my father, but I couldn’t exactly stay in his coven when I had no powers of my own. There’s rules, or something. So he set me up with my flower shop, since flowers are what I’m good at, and I’ve been thriving ever since.” He managed another weak smile. “If you stab me right now, you will immediately cease being my favorite customer.”

Andrew huffed and finally sheathed his knife. “I suppose I owe you a history in turn,” he said as he reached for the roses, mindful of the thorns. Who knew what his own blood would do to the potion. “But we need to talk while I work. I don’t have long before the shop opens.”

“Okay.” Neil settled in beside him to watch as he put a little water in the vase again and set it on top of the runes.

Andrew closed his eyes and took a deep breath through his nose, which was a mistake, because under the aroma of fresh roses and another strong sweet scent that had to be the wallflowers, Neil smelled a little earthy and sweaty, like he’d been toiling in the greenhouse, and thinking about other reasons Neil could get sweaty and dirty was not conducive to his concentration. Especially not when it was followed by the memory of Neil shutting down the stuttering customer without hesitation or even realization, only to blush over Andrew’s fertilizer. He refocused himself by taking the cauldron off the fire and dumping it in the sink, scrubbing it out quickly with water amidst a cloud of hissing steam. He didn’t begin to speak until it went quiet and he had returned to Neil’s side with the clean cauldron.

“My birth mother left me on the steps of a church when I was an infant, likely due to some portent or display of magic. She was apparently very _devout_ ,” he said derisively. “I was basically raised by the priests for a decade, despite their disapproval of my interest in science and the increasing number of odd things that happened around me. When I was ten, a family in the church expressed an interest in fostering me. Really, I think the priests agreed just to get me and my unholy incidents off of ‘hallowed’ ground, and the family agreed to try and curb my scientific leanings and bring me back into the fold. As if I’d ever really belonged.”

Neil snorted, and Andrew felt oddly better at the assurance that he wasn’t shitting all over Neil’s beliefs, though he should have guessed Neil didn’t conform to the Church, given the upbringing he’d outlined. He measured dried herbs into his mortar.

“Cass and Richard – the mother and father,” he clarified as he continued, “were good people. They were kind, and thought they were doing the right thing, and anyway it was easy to sneak in books on medicine and herbs and study at night. They weren’t so much against me reading or learning about sciences, just in bolstering my lackluster faith. It was their son—”

Andrew broke off and paused in his vicious grinding of herbs, glancing reflexively at the black silkie bones that were just coming to a boil. When he met Neil’s eyes, the understanding he saw there let him know he didn’t need to continue, but he didn’t take the easy way out. “He said he needed to break me before I could be ‘remade in holiness’. It only took the first few…attempts for me to realize that not even he believed that garbage religious reasoning. He wasn’t trying to convince himself of his lack of sin, he was just trying to fuck with my head as much as my…”

Andrew stopped talking again as he carefully poured the powdered herbs into the black water, and added more kindling to the fire under the cauldron. When he looked up, it was incredibly difficult to meet Neil’s eyes. Instead he observed the rigid set of the florist’s shoulders, the way the pink burns on his knuckles were white with how tightly they were popping out of clenched fists. The rage on his behalf should have made him feel weak, feel angry, feel ashamed, like it would from anyone else, but instead, it calmed him. There was a certain amount of understanding and sameness between two men who’d been abused as children, albeit in different ways.

“Drake was in the market one day and he came across…a twin I never knew I had.”

Neil’s eyes widened as he finally met them. “No obvious magic in him, so our mother kept him. Drake came home cooing over how much he wanted to bring the two of us together, how he was sure it would ‘ _make us whole’_ . After all his talk about breaking and fixing, I knew what he meant. But I didn’t have a chance to do anything about it, to…I don’t know. Leave. Find my twin. Warn him. _Something._ To keep a long story short, Drake followed Aaron to find out where he lived, and then killed his mother the next night. I suppose he thought his parents might have rights to become Aaron's guardian as well, as some kind of next-of-kin by proxy to me. Aaron didn't have any other family in the city.”

The potion was pitch black and boiling now, and Andrew watched the last of the water being slowly used up by the roses. “Instead, our cousin Nicky left his parents behind in the capital city. He’s the kind of person who can’t stand to be alone, so he’d been suffering his parents’ abuse for years on account of his attraction to men, but when he intercepted the letter that came to his father about his aunt’s death, he didn’t even tell them. He just packed up everything he owned and left to be a family with his newly-orphaned cousins.” Andrew snorted. “Without any kind of plan on how to survive. He hopped around jobs to make ends meet while I went through masters looking for a suitable apprenticeship. I found Wymack here. I got Aaron his apprenticeship with Wymack’s wife at the hospital, and Nicky finally settled into a job he liked after we started to board with Wymack’s family. It works well for us.”

For a person who usually spoke so little, Andrew wondered why he wasn’t exhausted or irritated with how much he’d been revealing. But it felt right, when he looked at Neil. Especially after Neil’s own confessions. Truth for a truth. Andrew picked up the vase of dried roses and stood. “This story doesn’t seem to be staying short. But to wrap it up, Drake left the royal guard because he ‘felt a calling to work with less fortunate children’, and he’s due to be assigned director of a newly-constructed orphanage as soon as it’s ready to open. I…can’t face him head on,” he admitted, with again less shame than he thought he should feel. “I found this recipe for a targeted curse in an old book, because I can’t be sure that I can get it into something that only he will drink.” He held the vase aloft. “…Cross your fingers.”

One more time, he tipped the roses over the potion from a height – he thought now that might symbolize his long history with the intended, increasing the potency, perhaps – and the liquid wavered into transparency as the roses dissolved into shimmers on the surface and sank. The steam reached his nose a moment later – even more sweet than the previous nearly-successful attempt, but on the heel of the scent was a tendril of power so strong that it seemed to hit his lungs sharply and disperse throughout his body. His heart leaped, and a small smile crept onto his face, proud and vicious and relieved.

“I don’t think you need him to drink it,” Neil finally spoke up. Andrew glanced at him, bemused, and Neil continued. “The roses represent the nature and strength of your past with him, your…bond, such as it is. They’re his undoing, but they’re just as powerful for you. I can’t tell you how I know, but I know that if you drink it, he will die.”

Andrew stared at him, at this cute snarky tragic man he’d known less than a week, and was annoyed to realize that he trusted Neil’s advice. He carefully picked up the little cauldron off the fire, and noted that it was pleasantly warm, not hot. That cinched it, and he lifted it to his mouth, downing it in long, slow gulps. It was truly, deliciously sweet, like it was pandering to his tastes. It felt _right_. The way the warmth and power flooded through his body, a much stronger rush of the sensation he’d gotten from just smelling it, felt amazing, and he was astonished at the way his worst memories of Drake flashed and dulled before his mind’s eye, still there, but fading like old parchment. His heart beat wildly for a few seconds, as if struggling, and then returned to a normal, if a bit quick, pace.

In that moment, he knew in his bones that Drake was dead. Even though he could hear his own pulse thumping in his ears, he still had to press ginger fingers to his heart and feel it beating before he could relax.

Clumsy with the aftershocks of power coursing through his veins, Andrew sat down heavily next to Neil, but his soul felt lighter than maybe it ever had. Neil was watching him with a satisfied expression that possessed a bit of that glint of pleased malice he’d shown while assembling the rude bouquet the day they’d met. “I could kiss you right now,” Andrew stated bluntly, setting the cauldron down and turning to assess Neil’s reaction. Neil’s face revealed no delight or displeasure at the idea; in fact Neil didn’t respond at all. Andrew picked up and fiddled with the metal cover he used for smothering his cauldron fires, waiting for Neil to think on it, and after a minute Andrew added, carefully, “Yes or no?”

“Oh,” Neil eyes widened. “I thought that was just a turn of phrase.” An attractive flush rose in his cheeks for the second time that day. “Well, yes, then.”

Andrew put out the fire, caught Neil’s face between his hands, and started one there instead.


End file.
